


It's A Long Corgi...

by AlexiaBlackbriar13



Series: The Dogs of Team Arrow [1]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Corgis, Dogs, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Hiding Dogs, Math Humour, Queen Family, SO MUCH FLUFF, season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-02-01 01:49:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12694563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexiaBlackbriar13/pseuds/AlexiaBlackbriar13
Summary: William accidentally, secretly adopts a corgi puppy.Felicity and Oliver eventually find out. Eventually.





	It's A Long Corgi...

**Author's Note:**

> I don't even know... This is so fluffy I think I might vomit. Enjoy the Queen family being adorable with a corgi puppy.
> 
> Thanks to Muriel who cheerleaded me? I guess? She yelled at me to write it so I did lol.
> 
> And thanks to Janis for suggesting I use Christopher as William's middle name.
> 
> Enjoy!

“Gizmo, no! Stop! Dad’s gonna be so mad at you! GIZMO!”

Felicity paused, frowning with her coffee cup touching her lips. She took a sip of the bitter, life-giving nectar, definitely needing the caffeine boost since it was only six in the morning, before she headed over towards William’s bedroom. Noting how unusual it was for his door to be closed - Oliver often told him to leave it open in case he had a nightmare and wanted his parents to run to him quickly - she knocked.

She heard the boy frantically shushing for a couple of seconds before silence fell. The blonde sighed. She cast a glance over to where the door to her and Oliver’s bedroom was located. Now her boyfriend was back on Green Arrow duties since Diggle had gone with Lyla to Switzerland to get specialist treatment for his nerve damage, Oliver often arrived home very late at night, usually very early morning, and hardly got any sleep. It was a Saturday, and she was determined to allow her boyfriend to sleep in for as long as possible, as he didn’t have to report to City Hall for mayor duties until eleven am. The only reason she and William were up early was due to the fact that Will was meeting up with Zoe Ramirez; they were going to the zoo with Rene and Dinah to complete some paired school science project about animal adaptations.

William should have been out of his room, showered, dressed and ready for breakfast, ten minutes ago. Felicity didn’t want to say she was worried but - she was kind of worried. “Will? You okay, buddy?”

There was no response. Her anxiety heightening, Felicity let herself in.

She froze at the sight before her. Slowly shutting the door behind her, she questioned incredulously, “Is that a _corgi?_ ”

William stared at her with eyes as round as plates, his expression one of complete panic and horror. He was trying to wrestle a pair of socks out of a tiny corgi puppy’s jaws. Felicity had no idea where the corgi had come from. They _definitely_ didn’t have a corgi as a pet. They didn’t even have fish. She knew that for certain because Oliver had accidentally killed William’s first pet fish when his son had gone off on a school trip for a couple of days and Oliver had forgotten to feed it.

Felicity shook that random turn of thought out of her head.

Because _CORGI_. In William’s bedroom. Chewing on socks that William was desperately trying to get out of its mouth.

“Um,” William managed, his voice strained. “So… it’s kind of a funny story.”

“William Christopher Queen, you better explain to me _right now_ why there is a random corgi puppy in your bedroom,” Felicity said warningly, crossing her arms across her chest as she resumed her Mom-stance. She’d perfected her voice when it came to these sort of arguments and confrontations over the last couple of months, and William cringed as the full force of The Mom™ swept over him. “Does your dad know about this?”

“Please don’t tell Dad!” William immediately pleaded, springing to his feet. He lifted the corgi puppy up into his arms, cradling it against his chest. The corgi happily continued chewing on the socks, none the wiser to the showdown that was occurring between son and future step-mom. “Please, _please_ don’t tell Dad! He’s just a puppy and - I found him abandoned in the alley outside the bunker’s garage, I couldn’t leave him there! Look at how cute he is! He just really needed help! I meant to bring him home and tell you guys and take him to an animal shelter but he’s just too cute! And - he hasn’t caused any trouble over the last couple of days so -”

“Wait, stop,” Felicity ordered, running a hand through her hair in exasperation. “The last couple of days? Will, how long have you been hiding the puppy in your bedroom?”

He looked guilty. “Only five days,” he murmured.

“Oh my god.” William had managed to hide a dog in his bedroom from her and Oliver for five days!? How was that even possible!?

She must have blurted her internal dialogue aloud because Will nodded urgently. “See? You didn’t even realise Gizmo was here! I looked after him and walked him and fed him for five days without needing you two to help me! So I can totally look after him by himself and keep him for a pet.”

He was clutching the puppy tightly, almost possessively, his eyes wide and desperate as he tried to reason with her. Felicity had to admit - William was right. He obviously could look after a dog considering she and Oliver hadn’t even noticed the corgi was living in the apartment with them. Seeing how the puppy was licking at Will’s neck, little ears perked as he abandoned the chewed-up sock in favour of slavering the boy’s cheeks with dog saliva, Felicity sighed. “You’ve really got attached to that little guy, huh.”

“Yes! So please can I keep him?” William begged.

Felicity narrowed her eyes. She had no idea how Oliver was going to react to all this. Oliver liked dogs, but she didn’t know how open he would be to the idea of their small, slightly dysfunctional, still new family owning one. Dogs were for stable families. Families that did not involve vigilantes that shot arrows and hacked federal databases. And William still had PTSD and anxiety from the traumatic events he went through due to Adrian Chase on the island, that resulted in him losing his mother.

“Tell you what,” she said slowly. “You keep him in your room for the next few days and I’ll try and warm Oliver up to the idea of us having a dog - without letting him know that we already have one. Does that sound good to you?”

William lit up. “Really?”

“Yeah.” She cracked a grin. “Gizmo, wasn’t it?”

Blushing, William nodded, kneeling down so he could release the corgi puppy and let him roam freely around his bedroom again. “Yeah.”

“As in, Gizmo from Gremlins?”

“We watched it last weekend,” William muttered, as if embarrassed.

Felicity laughed. “Educating you on old 90s movies was the best idea I’ve ever had. Alright, I’ll call Rene and Dinah and inform them that you guys will be having a furry friend accompanying you to the zoo today. I’ll start preparing Oliver for the realisation that whoops, his son accidentally, secretly adopted a corgi puppy.”

William rushed up to her and threw his arms around her. Felicity exhaled sharply when Oliver’s son buried his head into her neck with an almost sobbed, “Thank you,” hugging her tightly. It reminded her precisely of the very first hug that William ever gave her, when Felicity brought Oliver back to his son after a very rough night on the streets that he hadn’t expected to make it home from. She wrapped her arms around the boy and squeezed him, whispering, “You’re welcome,” before pulling away.

The next minute, she had an armful of corgi. “I need to go and eat breakfast,” William called back to her, slipping out of his room to run to the kitchen. “Look after him for a minute please!”

Sighing, the blonde settled down on the boy’s bed and placed the corgi down onto the comforter beside her. Gizmo’s short, stubby tail was wagging fiercely as he cocked his head sideways at her curiously with a little huff. He was so adorable. Maybe Gizmo could be her secret weapon in the conversation about dogs with Oliver. One look at the pup and Oliver would melt into a puddle of goo on the floor.

The corgi had a scrap of fabric caught between his canines from where he’d been chewing socks, so with a tut, Felicity urged the puppy to open his mouth up so she could unhook it. Licking his lips, Gizmo bounded off to knead his paws on his young master’s pillow as Felicity examined the piece of sock.

Her heart sank as she realised what it was. “William?”

He stuck his head around the door, mouth half full of a granola bar as he said, “What?”

“Is there a chance Gizmo could have somehow found his way into your dad’s sock drawer?”

“Um, possibly,” he answered with a shrug, words garbled as he finished off the bar by stuffing the rest of it into his mouth. “Why?”

“I think your puppy just destroyed Oliver’s favourite socks.”

William choked and hastily swallowed his mouthful, sprinting through the doorway and crashing into the bed to grab the scrap of green fabric out of Felicity’s hand. “ _SHIT_.”

“Language,” Felicity instantly admonished, but internally she was screaming, _fuck, we’re screwed, Oliver is gonna go batshit insane._

The green fabric was from Oliver’s favourite pair of socks - which happened to be limited edition, hand-knitted Christmas Green Arrow socks. It wasn’t the fact that they were Green Arrow socks that made them the archer’s favourite. William had given them to Oliver as a gift their first Christmas together as a signal to his father, who had given up being the Green Arrow to spend more time with his son and stay out of danger, that he was okay with his dad donning the hood again. The socks had represented William’s trust that Oliver would return home to him every night. They might have only been worth five dollars when William had bought them initially, but those socks were worth more than hundreds of billions of dollars to Oliver. They meant the absolute world to the archer.

And now, they were gone. Torn up by a corgi puppy’s canines, the scraps soaked in saliva, with half of one of the socks probably in the puppy’s stomach.

“Any chance we could also not mention _this_ to Dad straight away?” William asked weakly.

“I think your Dad is gonna notice his favourite socks are missing, Will,” Felicity said seriously.

“They were just socks,” he tried.

“Not to him,” Felicity replied shortly.

“I can get him more socks.”

“Buddy, you know that’s not how this works. Those socks were everything to your dad. You’ll have to tell him.”

“Felicity? William?”

Both their heads shot up in alarm, Felicity flailing and William lunging to grab Gizmo from where he was sniffing at the headboard. William quickly picked up what appeared to be some sort of dog chew from under his dirty clothes piled in the corner, shoved it into the corgi’s mouth before urging him into the closet. He wouldn’t be in there for long, only until Felicity had Oliver distracted and Will could get the puppy to the car, but Felicity still felt bad about it.

She practically staggered out of William’s room, plastering a very wide, falsely happy smile on her face as she greeted her boyfriend cheerily, “Oliver!”

The archer blinked at her blearily. His hair was ruffled, sticking up in all directions due to just having woken up, and he was wearing just boxer briefs. He looked tired as he frowned, questioning, “What’s going on?”

“Nothing!” Felicity squeaked.

Oliver just shot her a confused look.

“Polynomials!” William shouted, jumping out of his room to join them, waving his hands in the air as if trying to explain some complex physics formulae. “Pythagoras’ Theorem! Exponentials and natural logarithms!”

Poor Oliver appeared even more bewildered. “Are you… yelling math words at me?”

“Binomial expansions, integration and the quotient rule!” Felicity said wildly, deciding to join in on William’s tactic of apparently distracting his father by shouting random mathematical stuff.

"Representation of data! Coordinate geometry!"

"Arithmetic series and completing the square!"

Oliver shook his head, aghast. “I’m… going back to bed,” he muttered, turning on the spot and disappearing, closing the bedroom door behind him.

Both William and Felicity sighed in relief. Felicity collapsed onto the couch just as William’s bedroom door, that was open by a slit, was forced open by the corgi puppy, which had somehow escaped the closet, running out with a yip to jump at his master’s legs.

William picked up the puppy and sank down into the cushions beside Felicity. “I can’t believe that worked,” he said, dazed. “I was just saying random stuff I read from that college math textbook. I didn’t even understand what we were saying.”

“Your dad certainly didn’t, which is why he left. I think the fact that he’s sleep deprived and was probably zoned out helped.”

“What even _are_ integration and exponentials?”

“You’ll find out in a couple years, kid,” Felicity exhaled, patting him on the shoulder. “Now, grab your backpack and that puppy. Let’s get you and Gizmo out of here and to the zoo before your dad wakes up again and asks me why the hell we were shouting math at him at six in the morning.”

* * *

They managed to keep Gizmo a secret from Oliver for another day. Felicity had coaxed Oliver into a conversation about getting William a dog while his son had been at the zoo (with his secret corgi) and was relieved to find out that the archer wasn’t opposed to it and was willing to get William one, maybe to act as an emotional support dog. Gizmo definitely wasn’t old enough to be trained to be any kind of service dog, but he could be in the future, which was reassuring. The only reason the archer didn’t discover the existence of the corgi that evening was that he was still at City Hall when William was dropped off home by Rene and Dinah, and then didn’t get back to the apartment until 3am the next morning after Green Arrow patrols.

It was, however, that morning that Oliver found out about Gizmo.

And not exactly in the best way, either.

Felicity was half-asleep, bathing in the warmth of their shared bed with her side pressed against her boyfriend’s when Oliver’s calm, but ever so slightly wavering voice cut through her slumber.

“Felicity, what is on my face?”

Yawning, Felicity glanced up with half-lidded eyes. In her drowsy state, she simply saw the corgi puppy lying on top of Oliver’s face and just acknowledged flippantly, “Oh, that’s Gizmo,” before nuzzling into the archer’s arm with a sleepy sigh.

“Okay, firstly, what the hell is a Gizmo, and secondly, get it off me, please.”

Much more awake now, Felicity sat up and brushed her hair out of her face. She snickered when she saw that Oliver was lying on his back, completely still. Gizmo was panting happily, tiny body resting on top of her boyfriend’s face and smothering him as if the corgi had absolutely no cares in the world. Which… Felicity supposed he did. What did corgis have to worry about? They were corgis. The cutest, most adorable fluffballs to ever exist.

“That’s Gizmo,” Felicity repeated, her voice amused.

Oliver carefully grasped the puppy around the stomach and lifted him into the air, off his face so he could finally breathe. The archer stared at the tiny corgi that blinked down at him, as content as he always seemed to be. “As in Gizmo from Gremlins?” he questioned.

“Yes, exactly!” Felicity grinned, excited Oliver had got the pop culture reference.

“Okay,” the archer said, drawing out the word. “Why is there a corgi puppy called Gizmo sleeping on my face?”

“FELICITY, have you seen Gizmo!? He escaped my -”

William burst into the bedroom, looking around searchingly with a distressed gleam in his eyes. Thankfully, neither Felicity nor Oliver slept naked anymore due to this happening fairly often. (Their son apparently had an aversion to knocking on doors and had accidentally run into their bedroom to see them tangled together, naked, too many times).

“ - room,” William finished lamely, wilting at the sight of his father with the corgi being held in the air above him. “Um. Dad, meet Gizmo.”

“So I guess this is the reason why Felicity was so adamant about having the dog conversation with me yesterday,” Oliver said dryly.

“Please, can I keep him!?” William hit his dad with his signature puppy dog expression, his begging too adorable for him to be denied. “Please? Felicity already said I could!”

Felicity spluttered. “I never actually said that!”

“You kind of implied it,” Will said.

“How long have we owned a corgi puppy for?” Oliver questioned, finally sitting up against the headboard. He kept Gizmo in his lap, and the puppy seemed happy to stay there, as the archer was gently stroking over the pup’s fur, scratching under his chin and between his ears.

William glanced over at Felicity. She raised her eyebrows at him. “Um. Six days,” he replied sheepishly. “Felicity found out yesterday.”

“And I presume he’s already got a collar, leash, bed and all the dog supplies?”

Jumping onto the end of their bed to sit cross-legged, William reached out to join his father in petting the corgi. “Yeah. I bought all the stuff he needs myself.”

“All by yourself?”

William nodded.

Oliver looked impressed. “And you looked after him for five days without us even realising he was here?”

William nodded again, looking even more hopeful. Felicity grinned. She knew that Oliver had already decided that the corgi would be staying.

“That’s pretty cool, buddy,” the archer admitted. “And I suppose since you’ve already named him… I _have_ to let you keep him, don’t I?”

Schooling his expression into one of seriousness, William agreed, as if this was some sort of business negotiation. “Yes, of course. It’s only fair. But, um… there is something you should know before you agree to let Gizmo stay with us?”

“Which is?”

William swallowed, looking over at Felicity for support. He appeared terrified to tell his father that his puppy had destroyed his beloved Christmas Green Arrow socks. Figuring that her future stepson had already confessed enough to his father and anything more, William’s anxiety would definitely start acting up, she decided to take one for the team.

Reaching over to take hold of her boyfriend’s hand in comfort, Felicity informed him solemnly, “There has been a death.”

Oliver looked alarmed. “A death?”

“Yes. Your pair of Green Arrow Christmas socks had a long and fulfilling life. May those socks rest in peace for eternity.”

The archer stared at her. “Are you… trying to tell me that the corgi ate my favourite socks?”

“Yes, I am.”

An anguished look flittered across Oliver’s face, that was very rapidly replaced with anger. “Those were my _favourite socks_.”

“Yes, they were,” she soothed him, rubbing his shoulder as she shifted so she was half-embracing him. “And Will and I both know why. But Gizmo is a puppy and we can’t be angry at him for doing puppy things.”

Oliver gazed down at the corgi in his lap with an unreadable expression. Gizo was now gnawing at William’s fingers with tiny pleased huffs. It was adorable. The archer’s blank facade cracked and he grumbled, “I guess… he _is_ a puppy… and he is really cute.”

“So we can keep him?” his son perked up.

“Yeah, we can keep him,” the archer sighed.

William beamed with happiness and, like he did with Felicity, wrapped his dad up in a massive hug. Oliver embraced him back with a fond roll of his eyes, brushing a kiss against his forehead as William released him. Felicity almost teared up at the sight. Their family was wonderful.

Scooping up corgi into his arms, William said brightly, “Thank you, Dad!” before running out of the room.

Collapsing back onto the mattress with a groan, Oliver tugged Felicity down beside him, encouraging her to snuggle up to his bare chest. She did so with a contented hum, gently running her fingers up and down one of his arms, mapping out the scattered small scars that covered his biceps. Both happy to just lie in bed in each other’s arms and relax for a while, Felicity found herself slipping back into a blissful sleep when Oliver jerked beside her, inhaling with a gasp.

“What it is?” she murmured, glancing up at him.

“Were you and William were yelling random math words at me yesterday to distract me from the fact that you were hiding a corgi?” he whispered.

“Yup.”

“Oh thank god.”

“Why? What did you think we were doing?”

“Speaking in some sort of secret code to communicate behind my back, deliberately using mathematical terms because you knew it would confuse me even more.”

“Hey, that’s not a bad idea.”

“Don’t you _dare_.”

“You already let us keep a corgi.”

“What can I say?” he mumbled into her hair. “I’m a pushover when it comes to my amazing girlfriend and incredible son.”

“And when it comes to the dog, too.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You were angry at him for like two seconds when you found out he destroyed your favourite socks and then you called him cute.”

“... Goddammit.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please leave kudos and comment :)
> 
> Tumblr: alexiablackbriar13  
> Twitter: lexiblackbriar


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